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From the Magazine

The Judgment of Paris
In August 2019, Facebook settled an eight-year legal dispute with a French schoolteacher. The complaint, made by Frédéric Durand, accused the platform of deleting his account because he posted an image of Gustave Courbet’s iconic oil painting, L’Origine du monde. A closely ...

Going Beyond the Veil
When I was growing up, my mother taught me about sex and sexual politics in two different ways. The biological mechanics she imparted via books that were all in English, assuring me that these meticulously labeled cross-sections of the male and female reproductive organs in fact ...

Battle Hymns of the Old South
Before he rounded the corner into downtown Graham, North Carolina, the Reverend Gregory Drumwright hushed the hundreds of marchers who had gathered on a steamy July day. He lifted his microphone and offered a morsel of history, some sustenance for the final stretch of the ...

When My Brothers Fell
As we grapple with the relentless Covid-19 outbreak, now in its second year, it may be easy to forget that we are already in the midst of another, older pandemic: HIV/AIDS. When it was first identified in the United States in 1981, the disease that would soon be named Acquired ...

Sonar Wildly
Only the most famous cemeteries have maps at the entrance locating the tombs of the dead. In the average graveyard, you have to follow the dirt paths that other feet have marked out. It is difficult to orient yourself among these pathways and shortcuts, especially the first time ...

It Had Been Beautiful
In the first few weeks of 2018, a lethal windstorm swept through Europe. In Germany, it blasted across several regions with gusts of up to 126 miles per hour. There were hundreds of thousands of power cuts. Trains stopped running and flights were cancelled. In some areas, ...

Wagnermania
When the revolution came to Dresden in 1849, Richard Wagner greeted it with unhinged ecstasy. “Whatever stands, must fall,” the thirty-five-year-old court conductor wrote that April in the radical periodical Volksblätter. “I will break the power of the mighty, of law, of ...

Puncher’s Chance
When I think of him in my childhood, my father is an evening man: impatient, loud, sporadically gentle. His days were spent outside, in this period uncertainly so, at the disposal of mostly unscrupulous subcontractors, corrupt and flagrantly benevolent to a gang of favorites of ...

Back from the Afterlife
I saw Heaven, or some version of it, in the late 1990s. This was on the days I stayed home sick from school, bingeing on Corn Pops and reruns of Unsolved Mysteries. Back then, the show was hosted by Robert Stack, a sort of Clinton-era Rod Serling with a raspy old-man voice and ...

Talk Like a Red
In the spring of 1997, New York City’s Classic Stage Company hosted a revival of the Depression-era play Waiting for Lefty. A New York Times review reflected on the “unfashionable” concerns of the playwright, Clifford Odets, while at the same time describing the world he ...

You Are Witness to a Crime
January 2021
Issue No. 55
The call came early in the morning, November 9, 1990. I believe it was Kim Christensen who telephoned to tell me Ray Navarro had just died, and invited me to sit with his body before he was taken away and cremated. A number of us from ACT UP who cared for Ray throughout his ...